If you lean towards journalist writing, this may be a comfortable style for you. Metaphors, analogies, anecdotes and other narrative techniques are the key to getting your ideas across in a compelling way.
Read the preface to Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, a true story about a WWII veteran and Olympian. The preface starts on page 14: http://www.cantonlocal.org/Downloads/unbroken-laura-hillenbrand.pdf
Notice Hillenbrand's effective use of a sensory details and imagery to capture different cinematic angles.
Read this excerpt from a Pulitzer Prize Winning article about Hurricane Katrina. The excerpt is from the middle of the article. Pay attention to the cinematic techniques the journalist used to create imagery and communicate an idea:
from Bruce Nolan. “Catastrophic” The Times-Picayne, August 30, 2005.
Along I-10 between Treme and Gentilly, only housetops were visible in a sea of floodwater. People waiting for rescue shined lights or called out to the rare motorist on the interstate.At 3:30 p.m., National Guard trucks started bringing dozens of people trapped in their houses to the Superdome. Many were barefoot and wrapped in sheets.In many neighborhoods, people waded through more than water waist, sometimes carrying food. Late Monday, a party of five adults waded along Tulane Avenue between Canal and Broad Streets, towing five toddlers in a large plastic tub. THE GRAND CANYON
The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 277 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it. Indeed, you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so high above it that the buses would look like ants and people would be invisible, and not a sound would reach you. The thing that gets you—that gets everyone—is the silence. The Grand Canyon just swallows sound. The sense of space and emptiness is overwhelming. Nothing happens out there. Down below you on the Canyon floor, far, far away, is the thing that carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon’s lip it looks thin and insignificant. It looks like an old shoelace. Everything is dwarfed by this mighty hole. - Bill Bryson
Excerpt from "A Wicked Wind Takes Aim." Tribune. 05 Dec 2004.
Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that's the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It's a long, deep breath. It's no time at all. It's an eternity.
If the sky could hold a grudge, it would look the way the sky looked over northern Illinois that day. Low, gray clouds stretched to the edges in a thin veneer of menace. Rain came and went, came and went, came and went.
The technical name for what gathered up there was stratiform cloud cover, but Albert Pietrycha had a better way to describe it: "murk." It was a Gothic-sounding word for a Gothic-looking sky. A sky that, in its own oblique way, was sending a message.
Pietrycha is a meteorologist in the Chicago forecast office of the National Weather Service, a tidy, buttoned-down building in Romeoville, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. It's a setting that seems a bit too ordinary for its role, too bland for the place where the first act of a tragedy already was being recorded. Where the sky's bad intentions were just becoming visible, simmering in the low-slung clouds.
Where a short distance away, disparate elements--air, water and old sandstone blocks--soon would slam into each other like cars in a freeway pileup, ending eight lives and changing other lives forever.
The survivors would henceforth be haunted by the oldest, most vexing question of all: whether there is a destiny that shapes our fates or whether it is simply a matter of chance, of luck, of the way the wind blows.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Free Speech for Computers?
By TIM WU
Published: June 19, 2012
This may sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction. But it’s become a real issue with important consequences.
In today’s world, we have delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new friends. In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment.
Baseball historians continue to poke around in the 19th century to better explain how the game was originated and developed, but I've always wondered if one of the prime movers wasn't a student of Shakespeare. While I certainly don't know the terminology of all ball games, the popular ones I'm aware of — everything from basketball and football to golf and tennis — all use some variations of the words in and out when determining whether the ball is playable.Only baseball is different."Fair is foul and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air."
If you lean towards journalist writing, this may be a comfortable style for you. Metaphors, analogies, anecdotes and other narrative techniques are the key to getting your ideas across in a compelling way.
Read the preface to Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, a true story about a WWII veteran and Olympian. The preface starts on page 14:
http://www.cantonlocal.org/Downloads/unbroken-laura-hillenbrand.pdf
Notice Hillenbrand's effective use of a sensory details and imagery to capture different cinematic angles.
Read this excerpt from a Pulitzer Prize Winning article about Hurricane Katrina. The excerpt is from the middle of the article. Pay attention to the cinematic techniques the journalist used to create imagery and communicate an idea:
from Bruce Nolan. “Catastrophic” The Times-Picayne, August 30, 2005.
Along I-10 between Treme and Gentilly, only housetops were visible in a sea of floodwater. People waiting for rescue shined lights or called out to the rare motorist on the interstate.At 3:30 p.m., National Guard trucks started bringing dozens of people trapped in their houses to the Superdome. Many were barefoot and wrapped in sheets.In many neighborhoods, people waded through more than water waist, sometimes carrying food. Late Monday, a party of five adults waded along Tulane Avenue between Canal and Broad Streets, towing five toddlers in a large plastic tub.
THE GRAND CANYON
The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 277 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it. Indeed, you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so high above it that the buses would look like ants and people would be invisible, and not a sound would reach you. The thing that gets you—that gets everyone—is the silence. The Grand Canyon just swallows sound. The sense of space and emptiness is overwhelming. Nothing happens out there. Down below you on the Canyon floor, far, far away, is the thing that carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon’s lip it looks thin and insignificant. It looks like an old shoelace. Everything is dwarfed by this mighty hole. - Bill Bryson
Excerpt from "A Wicked Wind Takes Aim." Tribune. 05 Dec 2004.
Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that's the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It's a long, deep breath. It's no time at all. It's an eternity.
If the sky could hold a grudge, it would look the way the sky looked over northern Illinois that day. Low, gray clouds stretched to the edges in a thin veneer of menace. Rain came and went, came and went, came and went.
The technical name for what gathered up there was stratiform cloud cover, but Albert Pietrycha had a better way to describe it: "murk." It was a Gothic-sounding word for a Gothic-looking sky. A sky that, in its own oblique way, was sending a message.
Pietrycha is a meteorologist in the Chicago forecast office of the National Weather Service, a tidy, buttoned-down building in Romeoville, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. It's a setting that seems a bit too ordinary for its role, too bland for the place where the first act of a tragedy already was being recorded. Where the sky's bad intentions were just becoming visible, simmering in the low-slung clouds.
Where a short distance away, disparate elements--air, water and old sandstone blocks--soon would slam into each other like cars in a freeway pileup, ending eight lives and changing other lives forever.
The survivors would henceforth be haunted by the oldest, most vexing question of all: whether there is a destiny that shapes our fates or whether it is simply a matter of chance, of luck, of the way the wind blows.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Free Speech for Computers?
By TIM WU
Published: June 19, 2012
This may sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction. But it’s become a real issue with important consequences.
In today’s world, we have delegated many of our daily decisions to computers. On the drive to work, a GPS device suggests the best route; at your desk, Microsoft Word guesses at your misspellings, and Facebook recommends new friends. In the past few years, the suggestion has been made that when computers make such choices they are “speaking,” and enjoy the protections of the First Amendment.
This is a bad idea that threatens the government’s ability to oversee companies and protect consumers. (Read the entire article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/opinion/free-speech-for-computers.html?ref=opinion)
"The Language of Baseball: In is Out and Foul is Fair" Frank Deford National Public Radio
Baseball historians continue to poke around in the 19th century to better explain how the game was originated and developed, but I've always wondered if one of the prime movers wasn't a student of Shakespeare. While I certainly don't know the terminology of all ball games, the popular ones I'm aware of — everything from basketball and football to golf and tennis — all use some variations of the words in and out when determining whether the ball is playable.Only baseball is different."Fair is foul and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air."